CMU School of Drama


Wednesday, April 04, 2018

Thoughts from Mark Shanda - USITT President

sightlines.usitt.org: The mission of USITT is to connect performing arts design and technology communities to ensure vibrant dialogue among practitioners, educators, and students. Let that mission statement roll around in your head for just a minute and please keep that central to your engagement for the balance of the week. Some key words that jump out to me include community and vibrant dialogue. In this past year, our community has faced challenges that we never imagined we would face and the need for vibrant dialogue is critical.

1 comment:

Drew H said...

I’m sorry I did not have a chance to hear this speech in person, I am sure it would have been quite powerful to hear this words in a room full of others. I had not really thought a whole lot about how close our industry has been to quite a few tragedies. It is good to see the steps we are taking to train people for these situations, but it’s terrifying that this is something that makes sense to train people on. “What is an appropriate response?” is a really interesting question because there is no answer. There is no appropriate response except turning back time and stopping a tragedy from happening, but that’s not possible. So we must train, we must learn how to react, we must do things we shouldn’t have to do to prevent loss of life. It’s a scary time and while a lot of the work we do is to reflect that and to take people out of the world for a little, we also have to be aware that anything can happen and no one is invincible.