Teaching the “intangibles”: Building pedagogical bridges between business, entrepreneurship, and theatre

Abstract

The interdisciplinary nature of theatre is perhaps obvious to those who work and teach within the discipline. However, amid budget cuts and an increasingly neoliberal socio-political context, it is becoming increasingly necessary to teach beyond the discipline and to model the ways that theatre skills connect to, support, and complicate other areas of knowledge. For over five years, I have collaborated with a colleague who teaches in the College of Business and who invited me to teach a theatre workshop for his business and entrepreneurship students. Specifically, I was asked to teach "the intangibles," or elements of body language, acting, and improvisation. While these are "intangible," instinctual elements of a business proposal or interaction, they are much more tangible aspects of a theatre professor's pedagogy. Using my experience with these acting and improvisation workshops as a representative case study, this essay explores theatre's unique ability to build a bridge between the arts and business/entrepreneurship. With Howard Gardner's Five Minds for the Future as a theoretical framework, this essay offers both a model and justification for similar interdisciplinary collaborations. Moreover, the essay argues for an increased incorporation of such acting and improvisation courses in existing business/entrepreneurship curricula-both as a vehicle to sustain arts departments and to highlight the overlapping skills between performance and business.