A new program in the School of the Arts on the East Brunswick campus of the Middlesex County Vocational and Technical Schools (MCVTS) is exploring if scientific knowledge can spark creativity in the arts.
In cooperation with New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) in Newark, McCarter Theatre in Princeton and Rutgers University, 53 MCVTS theater students are being exposed to the latest in STEM — science, technology, engineering and math — in what is being called the STEAM project, adding “arts” into the equation. The goal for the students, who are studying acting, theatrical production and play writing, is to contribute to a festival of new plays for their spring production.
“We have a new type of student who is interested in STEM,” said Maria Aladren, MCVTS theater instructor. “We always talk about how the arts can make better scientists, but we rarely talk about how the sciences can make better artists. I think that is severely overlooked.”
Fourteen seniors are being taught how to establish a theater company by professionals from McCarter. They will use their knowledge to help produce the new play festival, including possibly finding a venue outside the school to stage the show.
In the second half of the school year, three award-winning professional playwrights — Nathan Alan Davis, Jessica Dickey and Dano Madden — will work with students to create three 20-minute plays for the festival. Two or three student-written plays also will be chosen for staging, Aladren said.
The project hopes to improve the students’ success in gaining college admissions by greater exposure to STEM courses, but also to inspire their writing, acting and staging of productions through the latest advances in technology.
“We will be taking the students to NJIT, where they are going to be exposed all of the ideas that are possible for artists’ creativity using technology,” Aladren said, giving the example of holographic projection as a possibility for use on the stage.
“We’re right now in the anything-goes stage,” she said.
As the date of the production approaches, professional set designers from McCarter will be on the East Brunswick campus five days a week to work with the students.
“McCarter has been very generous and very excited about this,” Aladren said.
Erica Nagel, McCarter’s director of education and engagement and a theater lecturer at Princeton University, praised Aladren and East Brunswick Vo-Tech Principal Jeffrey Bicsko for their passionate embrace of the project. She stressed that science and the arts are linked in the creative process.
“If you care about lighting design, you care about science,” Nagel said. “If you care about producing, you care about math.”
“We know they’re already getting a great arts education at the school. We want to enhance that,” she said. “We’re not starting at square one.”
Another aspect of the project is tracking the success of theater students in a physics class to see how they compare to other students. The hope is that their creativity will lead to academic success in this area, as well, Aladren said.