Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: "Those who remember the 1980 movie 'Fame' might imagine professional performing-arts schools as a place where kids flood into the streets to pirouette atop car hoods or burst into song vowing:
'I'm gonna make it to heaven/Light up the sky like a flame, fame/I'm gonna live forever/Baby remember my name ...'
What actually goes on inside a performing-arts high school program and the students' ambitions are somewhat different."
3 comments:
I have mixed feelings about high schools with such specific goals (like the folks they interviewed, not in the film.) Having gone to a roughly ordinary high school, in a fairly privileged suburban neighborhood, I felt absolutely amazed by how unaware and undereducated the population was. On one hand I feel that programs that detract from learning basics of reading, writing, and math (which many of my classmates were not functional with) amplify this problem. On the other hand though, part of the source of the problem was that we were all so disengaged with the school and the material that people didn't learn even what was actually being taught, so maybe a more targeted school could encourage folks to be more involved.
So, I think I understood this article. I would actually like to start by saying I was SLIGHTLY disappointed that theatre school was not the dancing fantasy land that is Fame. But I got over it.
Yeah, it's a complicated issue. Well, first off, I would like to respond, "duh," to the kids who had more fun in the performing arts atmosphere than the normal high school. Quite obviously...if you're a drama kid, you're going to have more fun doing drama. It's what got me through high school. However, I agree with Ethan in that part of the reason I chose Carnegie Mellon was because they stressed a worldly knowledge being crucial to one's success, as opposed to a school that only preached line weights, or dancing and singing for musical theatre kids, etc. However...for our professions, we need to focus mainly on our skills, hence the one elective per semester. It was a hard decision to give up liberal arts education, but the sacrifice is definitely well worth it. Second, high school sometimes saved me from drama. I really love taking a break from it once in a while, and going to a football game or taking a non-drama class. Of course, this is total preference, but I think any good designer/actor/director/whatever needs to branch out and learn about the world around him or her. I'm pretty sure that's just common knowledge, and seriously, you find a lot of it at CMU. I actually feel quite inadequate sometimes because I've met a lot of theatre kids who know a great deal about the world, regardless of their "eating, breathing, living" theatre personas. It's a good atmosphere in general, even if it's not Fame.
This article is very informative but seriously what were these people thinking? Remaking Fame is the worst idea ever. It went from an R rated movie to now it is PG. I am scared to go see it because it seems like it would be High School Musical all over again and I refused to see that garbage. Anyways so the remaking of Fame just pisses me off a little bit to say the least. This article is very interesting though in the fact that it shows what it is really like at a preforming arts high school.
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