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Drama
Division
The Drama Division was founded in 1968 by the renowned American director, producer, and theater administrator John Houseman and the French director, teacher, and actor Michel Saint-Denis. Houseman and Saint-Denis devised a four-year curriculum based upon the training methods Saint-Denis and his wife, Suria, had devised for their European and Canadian conservatories. Still in use today, these guidelines provide actors with a disciplined framework through which to explore the depths of their own creativity.
The co-directors selected a faculty, two members of which — Michael Kahn and Moni Yakim — are still at Juilliard today. Michael Kahn became the director in 1992, a position he held through the 2005-06 school year. (In 2002, the year of the Richard Rodgers centennial, the title was renamed Richard Rodgers Director of the Drama Division.) In September 2006, James Houghton, the founding artistic director of New York's Signature Theater Company, became the division's director. The first class of hopeful young actors to be admitted in the fall of 1968 to the new Drama Divsion was officially designated "Group I." The following year's entrants became "Group II," and thus the ongoing tradition of using entry sequence rather than graduation year to identify the classes was established. Roman numerals were replaced by Arabic ones in the year 2000, when Group 33 began its four-year course of study.
Distinguished alumni frequently return to the School to present master classes and provide students with a sense of what they will encounter as professional artists. Still true to the Saint-Denis guidelines, the students’ training emphasizes intuition and spontaneity as well as discipline, technique, and intellectual development. It is an approach that synthesizes what was once considered "European" in terms of vocal training, physical training, text, and style with what was peculiarly and brilliantly American — immense physical energy, intellectual and imaginative daring, willingness to take risks, and a fierce commitment to emotional honesty. Approximately 1,000 candidates now audition for about 18 places in each year's freshman class, a class that will work, perform, and develop together as an ensemble of actors. After more than a quarter-century, The Juilliard School's Drama Division has remained faithful to the mission described in its very first recruitment brochure: "We are trying to form an actor equipped with all possible means of dramatic production, capable of meeting the demands of today's and tomorrow's ever-changing theater, an actor who is capable of participating in those changes and who is inventive enough to contribute to them. For in the final analysis, whatever experiments may be attempted through fresh forms of writing, on new stages, using the latest technical devices, everything ultimately depends on the human being — the actor." |
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