Hey kid,
It’s a unique offering to be allowed to traverse the boundaries of time in order to have this moment with you. As you can see, we basically made it: we’re a professor on a tenure line, with a PhD and aggressive research agenda, and a working fight director. So let’s start by saying that in general, your life is working out pretty well. We should probably cover a few basics here about the future: DeLoreans won’t fly, Keanu Reeves won’t be able to do your theatre history research under the auspices of rock ’n’ roll and being generally awesome, and the computers haven’t taken over . . . yet.
But enough about me. Let’s talk about you, oh-know-it-all teenager who lives and works as an actor in New York City. In this public-private space, the ask was to leave you some wisdom (particularly about being a fight director among academic spheres). So buckle up, champ. I’ve got some knowledge to drop on you. There are some things you’ve figured out by now, and there are things that you’re going to keep figuring out. There are things you’re going to need to reconfigure time and again as the world changes around you, but there are a few things that I hope I can tell you from the hindsight of my now that might smooth the path.
Here’s an ugly truth about being a fight director, violence professional, and instructor of stage combat that none of your mentors have told you but that you’ll come to find out in time: your path is more difficult because you are a woman. You have studied with amazing instructors so far—all of them men—and you have glanced around your classes to see them overwhelmingly attended by white men. Often, you are the only femme person in the room. You won’t yet start to question the seeming absence of other folks from marginalized backgrounds, including genderqueer folx, people from the global majority, people of differing physical and neurological abilities, people in bodies of varying sizes outside of a “Broadway body” (as Ryan Donovan will coin the term), and those who embody identities at intersections of these margins. Your questioning of the composition of the rooms where training happens won’t begin for another decade or so, but when you look back on these early years, you will realize that the demographics you train with are shockingly narrow and that you are in a severe minority even as a white, cisgendered, heterosexual woman (a combination of identities that generally does not equate to a minority in theatre studies or theatre in general).
This trend will continue. In 2018, you will do a statistical analysis scraping the public-facing website of the nation’s largest stage combat organization (the Society of American Fight Directors, SAFD) and find an inverted pyramid of representation—that femme folx represent about 38% of recognized trained combatants at that time, but only 18.5% of the organization’s Certified Teachers in the same year. By 2022, 23% of the organization’s 179 active CTs will be femme-presenting. The only way to become a Certified Teacher through the SAFD is to be accepted into and successfully complete the Teacher Certification Workshop at the SAFD’s national stage combat workshop.1 Eight are accepted into that workshop whenever it is run (although it is run every year in your time, by 2024, it will be every other year). Despite the representational discrepancy in the society’s highest ranks along very clearly gendered lines, five of the eight students accepted into the 2024 workshop will present as men, and overwhelmingly these male-presenting folks will be white. You will converse with femme fight colleagues who will relate anecdotes about assisting SAFD CTs who continually make “fight like a girl” jokes about them, even as these women assist these teachers’ courses from positions of relative authority. You will all grimace at these memories, and some people in the room will shrug and say, “well, that’s just who those old guard are.” This will happen repeatedly.
You will also notice this trend in your work with the theatre community in which you will be planted by virtue of the geographic flexibility that academia necessitates. In the liberal blue belt of Boston (a theatrical nexus with close proximity to the incredibly professionalized world of New York City theatre), you will have no trouble finding work as a fight director. When you move to the more conservative and smaller/less professionalized theatre community in Buffalo, New York to take an academic position there, your work will dry up. You will look around and notice who is getting hired, and the same trend will be evident: it will be a small cadre of white men.
These two phenomena will be linked. The idea of “certification” will be a particular barrier when institutions ask about holding certain “certifications” (or being able to grant them to students) as part of a hiring process. These institutions will do so unaware that they are propagating inequitable practices by using outdated language that has no basis in stage combat credentialing.2
In teaching stage combat, and teaching in general, you will experience obstacles that your male-presenting colleagues will not. Students will expect you—a person in a femme body—to be more caring, nurturing, and “nice” than your male-presenting colleagues. Your students will act out when those expectations are not met. You will receive teaching evaluations using gendered slurs, and you won’t be the only one. Studies you begin to read will prove that Student Evaluations of Teaching (SETs) will bias against any instructor who does not present as a white man.3 Some of these studies will be done on asynchronous online classes where the students will never meet the instructor face-to-face. Those studies will show that the same exact class with the same exact syllabus with nothing changed but the instructor’s name will be rated higher by students if the name appears to reference a male instructor.4
In your stage combat classroom, the same gender divide you noticed in classes when you were a student will be visible in classes where you are an instructor; overwhelmingly, your stage combat classes will be taken by male-presenting people despite your other classes having fairly even gender representation. You will notice that your students behave better when you outwardly conform to stereotypes of feminized behavior but can somehow “prove yourself” in arenas associated with stereotypes of masculinity. In one semester of stage combat, you’ll have a student continue to come to you with small medical ailments (“my throat hurts, do you have a recommendation?”), and you will remind him, repeatedly, that you are not a physician. One day, he’ll interrupt you when you’re giving feedback to another group in class to say, “You’re a doctor, right? I woke up with a sore shoulder today, what do I do?” while a small group of his classmates titters behind him. You’ll realize, in that moment, that he’s not asking innocent advice, but rather trying to “get” you about putting “Dr. Danielle Rosvally” on your assignment sheets. You’ll say something along the lines of “am I being punked?” to which others of your students, now tittering, will nod affirmation. You will follow up with: “Get back to me when poetry and verse can help heal your existential angst, or when you have a question about the history of theatre that’s causing you to lose sleep.” You’ll wish you asked him instead if he so queries the credentials of his male-presenting instructors. In another semester, your TA will ask you (unprompted) about your max deadlift numbers in front of the class (your deadlift at this time hinges close to a state record for your weight class). After uttering this number out loud, you will experience no further discipline issues from any student in this class for the semester’s duration.
So where’s the hope? What will you do with all of this, any of this? How will you fight back?
You will start to better understand how you can use your privilege to uplift others. As you transition into tenure stream work in 2023 (yep, it will take that long to get a tenure track job—you graduate with your PhD in 2016; that’s a whole separate letter to you, though), your voice will get louder, and you will develop more experience using it in rooms where people listen. You will start to recognize how to strategically pick your battles. You won’t be an expert at that, but at least you will start to understand when you’re taking on impossible battles, even if you make the conscious choice to do so to voice what needs to be voiced.
You will learn to be a better ally. You will develop critical listening skills and work to create spaces where marginalized folx are protected and supported. You won’t be perfect at this either, and it will be an ongoing challenge to undo your own indoctrination into harmful hegemonic rhetorics. You will seek a balance between advocacy and centering yourself in spaces where you shouldn’t be centered. I’m sorry to say that this work won’t get easier, but at least the right choices will become clearer as you gain experience in making them.
You will start to recognize that your presence in spaces where stage combat happens is, in and of itself, a radical act. That by doing the work in the body you inhabit, you are moving the needle in the eyes of your students, your colleagues, and the actors you work with. You will also start to make friends with other femme-presenting people doing this work and, together, be able to discuss not just the issues you face, but how you can smooth the path for the next generation. Someday, a colleague will ask you to write a letter to your younger self to publish in the web edition of a top field journal. You will oblige and use the opportunity to tell other young women that they aren’t alone when they experience the problems you did. You will also tell them that if they need you, they can reach out to you (drosvall@buffalo.edu) and that you will do your best to help them in whatever way you can.
Because you’re you, none of this will be satisfying. Injustice in any form is intolerable to you (trust me, I know). But I also know—and I think you do too—that being the change you hope to see is one of the best legacies you can make for yourself. We’re doing that every single day. Trust that, and trust that if you know anything, it’s how to be the loud pushy New Yorker you are and that someday you’ll figure out how to use that power for good.
Keep doing the work. I’m proud of you.
Danielle (Dr. Rosvally!!!)
P.S. If you can start to figure out the difference between a restrictive clause and a nonrestrictive clause (that vs. which) now, you will save yourself a LOT of time proofreading your first book. Trust me on this one.
Notes
1. You will write more about this in “Challenging ‘Certification’: Revising Hiring Practices in Fight and Intimacy Choreography,” HowlRound Theatre Commons, 18 Oct. 2022, howlround.com/challenging-certification-revising-hiring-practices-fight-and-intimacy-choreography.
2. You will address this in your aforementioned HowlRound piece.
3. See Kerry Chávez and Kristina M. W. Mitchell, “Exploring Bias in Student Evaluations: Gender, Race, and Ethnicity,” PS: Political Science & Politics, vol. 53, no. 2, 2020, pp. 270–74, doi.org/10.1017/S1049096519001744; Michael Hessler et al., “Availability of Cookies during an Academic Course Session Affects Evaluation of Teaching,” Medical Education, vol. 52, no. 10, 2018, pp. 1064–72, doi.org/10.1111/medu.13627; Rebecca J. Kreitzer and Jennie Sweet-Cushman, “Evaluating Student Evaluations of Teaching: A Review of Measurement and Equity Bias in SETs and Recommendations for Ethical Reform,” Journal of Academic Ethics, vol. 20, no. 1, 2022, pp. 73–84, doi.org/10.1007/s10805-021-09400-w; Kristina M. W. Mitchell and Jonathan Martin, “Gender Bias in Student Evaluations,” PS: Political Science & Politics, vol. 51, no. 3, 2018, pp. 648–52, doi.org/10.1017/S104909651800001X.
4. See Lillian MacNell, et al., “What’s in a Name: Exposing Gender Bias in Student Ratings of Teaching,” Innovative Higher Education, vol. 40, no. 4, 2015, pp. 291–303, doi.org/10.1007/s10755-014-9313-4.
Work Cited
Donovan, Ryan. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Oxford UP, 2023.