Episode Transcript

W&L After Class

With Guest Stephanie Sandberg

Episode Transcript

Ruth Candler
Welcome to "W&L After Class: The Lifelong Learning Podcast." I'm your host, Ruth Candler. We're about to have another engaging conversation with one of W&L's expert faculty. Please join me as we continue our journey of lifelong learning through Washington and Lee. Our guest today is Stephanie Sandberg, assistant professor of theater, dance and film studies. Stephanie arrived at W&L in 2016 from Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she taught for 20 years at Calvin College. As an undergraduate student, she studied theater at Westmont College before earning her master's in dramatic art and a PhD in theater history from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Stephanie's research and her passion is social justice theater, which presents relevant cultural topics such as human sex trafficking and domestic violence through the art of dramatic productions. Stephanie, I'm so happy to have an opportunity to talk with you today. Thank you so much for joining us.

Stephanie Sandberg
Hi, thanks for having me. This is exciting. I'm glad to be here.

Ruth Candler
Well, you have a classic story to tell about how one course in college opened your eyes to what has since become the focus of your entire career. Would you tell us about that course and how it continues to inspire the work that you do at W&L?

Stephanie Sandberg
Yes. So back when I- actually when I was in graduate school- so yeah, I was definitely inspired by a lot of undergrad courses, as well, but I had the opportunity to take a master class when I was in graduate school from Anna Deavere Smith, who is a playwright and an actress, well known throughout the United States and around the world as a person who does interviews with people and then turns those interviews into what's called "verbatim theater" or "documentary theater." And she takes on an issue, she takes on an event or an issue or something that happened, like for example, the Los Angeles riots that happened in the 1980s. Or she's taken on things like—oh sorry, those were in the 1990s—or she's taken on issues like health care, and presidential politics, all kinds of stuff.

And so I happen to get a master class with her and she said some things in that class that really stuck with me. One was a quote that just stays with me. She says that "every single person on the planet has a literature inside them." In other words, we have aeons of stories to tell about our lives and our experiences, and our connections. And I was thinking about that over the course of years, and that really has stayed with me, because I think, you know, some people think, Oh, I don't have a story. I don't, I don't have that much of a life. I don't have anything to say. But inevitably everybody does. And it's finding how those stories live inside a person that is an exciting and interesting part of my work. And so yeah, I do this work where I interview people and turn those interviews into pieces of art—theater art, and film art—and, yeah, so it's been an exciting journey since that time, since that moment.

Ruth Candler
I've never heard the term "verbatim theater" used as a synonym for basically a documentary. And so when you think that much of your work involves documentary filmmaking, you mentioned that some of these projects focus on familiar subjects and others arise from your engagement with W&L students. Could you give an example of an encounter that sparked your interest in a topic and how that inspired a new project?

Stephanie Sandberg
I have had interesting conversations with students and they have been in my classes — and it's not just in my classes, but in in my life —and talking to me and telling me about their experiences. And this was years ago, so this, but this is an example of a student sparking a project. So a student came into my office who was a gay young man, and he was struggling with his sexual orientation. And he had not come out to his family, but many friends knew and he was certain that his parents were going to find out and that he needed to tell them himself. And he was scared to death because he was from a conservative Christian home and he didn't know how to do it, and I assured him, I said, I think it'll be okay. But then it wasn't okay.

When he went home for Thanksgiving break and told his family, they yanked him out of school and put him in a reparative therapy program. And he really—it took him years and years to recover from that. But at that moment in time, that project just, I said, Oh, well, here's an intersection of my experience, I am a person of faith. I also had a belief at the time, this was back in 2003, that people are created in the image of God, and that they, no matter what their sexual orientation...it's a biological part of humanity that we are born with. And so I wanted to find out why he was struggling so much, and what was going on there. And so that sparked a project called "Seven Passages," the stories of gay Christians, which is interviewed 127 people with the intersectionality of their faith and their sexual orientation, and turned those interviews first into a play that was performed, and then into a film as well. So, you know, the reason to do both theatre and film is accessibility for as many people as possible across the landscape of time and space. Film can traverse into a lot more corners of the world. Yeah.

Ruth Candler
Thank you for sharing that story about the student. That must have been a difficult time. Have you kept in touch with that student? And has he seen that film?

Stephanie Sandberg
Yes, I have kept in touch with him. I always I actually interviewed him for that play for that research. And he came to see the production. And he definitely said that he felt like his voice was represented well in the play, and then also in the film, and he's fine now, he has a husband and a family, two kids, and is doing really well.

Ruth Candler
That must have been very, very rewarding.

Stephanie Sandberg
Yeah, it is. It is. When you see your work help somebody, it's amazing.

Ruth Candler
Yeah, I'll bet. So let's talk about the the technical steps involved. Would you tell us more about those steps involved in making a documentary film?

Stephanie Sandberg
Yes. So I always involve students in my work because I've only worked at undergraduate institutions, Calvin College and now Washington and Lee University. And both of these institutions are high-level learning institutions where faculty are engaging with students. And so I have always had students as research assistants and as assistants, and as co-creators on projects. So the first process is to find the students who are interested in working on the project and who are available to work on it. And then from there, taking the subject, whatever it is, whether it's...race or sexual orientation or human trafficking, which I've made a piece about, or domestic violence, the first stage is to gather all of the research that you can that's in the popular culture, that is feeding our current knowledge of that subject. So this could be newspaper articles, it could be peer-reviewed journal articles, it could be other films and other plays. It could be, you know, there's so much. It could be television shows. There's so much popular imaginative material out there, and scholarly material. So the first goal is to get all that material and really make sure you understand it.

The second phase is to find interview subjects, and I usually do look for interview subjects through community partnerships. So for example, with that piece I mentioned, "Seven Passages," I partnered with churches, and I partnered with organizations, LGBTQ+ organizations that are working for human rights, and partnered with them to help me find people to interview. What we do is then we come up with a list of questions and we test those questions with people, we see if the questions are getting at the heart of the matter. And when we interview them, we start to hear narratives emerge, stories emerge, and we're looking for —we're listening and looking for— what I call a narrative saturation point. When you start to hear the same stories over and over again, then you know you're hitting a cultural nerve and that you found something there, that there's a commonality in experience... but you're looking for differences too, of course, but you're interested in both difference and commonality. And sometimes it takes a lot of interviews to find that narrative saturation. For example, with "Seven Passages," I started to interview people who identified as trans, however, I realized that that was a different story, the narrative was different. And I was like, oh, that's a separate project. I was like, oh, I want to do that one, too. I had to set it to the side at that time. Because, you know, you need to tailor and focus in the research.

So that's the next phase is tailoring it, focusing it in, finding a way to kind of edit it, I guess you could say, and finding a way to understand it. And then after that, you transcribe every single interview, you code all the interviews for commonalities, you look for key terms, key ideas, sociological coding. So I have a lot of background in sociology, as well. So then after you do the sociological coding, then you can start to piece together how do these interviews talk to each other? And then you create a piece that's performed—well, at least when I make a play, it's performed by actors, right? And so the actors are performing the verbatim interviews, the verbatim pieces of, you know, real human beings that are walking around, and who will come and see it.

Ruth Candler
A lot of hours that go into those projects.

Stephanie Sandberg
It is, it is. I've never counted, I don't want to know, really.

Ruth Candler
Sounds like it would be a very difficult thing to count. You've shared how involved your students are, and perhaps some of our listeners may wonder about the value of theater in a university education, even at an institution that promotes the study of the liberal arts as much as W&L does. What are some examples of how theater can pair with subjects across the educational spectrum?

Stephanie Sandberg
That's a vast question. I always tell students in theater, I'm like, your best education is a liberal arts education, because purely plays are about human subjects. Films are about human subjects. And so we have to know about all of humanity, from all of the scientific perspectives— you know, human sciences perspectives —to all of the humanities and the arts, including music and dance, and including, you know, poetry, and including biology and neuroscience, and all of these things. So like, a really good example of this is, currently I'm making a piece about loneliness, and one of the things that we were researching is the neuroscience of loneliness, which you can actually see loneliness imaged in the human brain. And I have a neuroscience major here at W&L who's also in the film program, and so it was like a perfect project for him, you know, to work on. Hieu is his name, and he was able to, like, bring together these two parts of his passion. So that's an example. But I find that all the time.

Another thing that I like to do is adapt novels for the stage. And so, you know, knowing a ton about literature is helpful. And being able to read and read into novels and read into poetry, then you also never know when you're going to have to direct a play or act in a play where you're dealing with math, you know, so there are plays about mathematics that it's like, okay, well, we better know some math, we definitely better. It's not that we have to be a master mathematician, it's that we need to fully understand the implications and ideas of mathematics. So there's some famous plays, like the play "Proof" is a play that's about math. So if you are going to act in or direct that play, you would need to know about math. So I like to make sure students are understanding the value of that liberal arts education. And then on the other side, you know, theater fits into the liberal arts education because these are our storytelling mechanisms or one of our greatest storytelling mechanisms, and stories matter to human beings. And they are what get us through life in a lot of ways.

Ruth Candler
Hearing that somebody else's experiences.

Stephanie Sandberg
Mm hmm.

Ruth Candler
Well, it's clear that being a researcher, a dramatist, and a filmmaker is thoroughly woven into who you are as a person. And you know, as you just so clearly explained, you're also an educator and have found many ways to involve the students in all aspects of your work from beginning to end. Could you go into more depth about some of the ways you've collaborated with students and how that benefits both you and the students?

Stephanie Sandberg
Yeah, so there's lots of examples. The film that we made, "Intimate Violence," which is about domestic violence, we partnered with Project Horizon in Lexington, Virginia, which is, well, I mean, they deal with domestic violence and sexual assault, primarily. We partnered with them, and I had students working with them, going through their volunteer training working with them. And we created the film from that community-based involvement. In particular, my student, Nolan Zunk, he collaborated fully with me on that film and eventually became a co-creator on it. At first, I was thinking of it more as solely, you know, okay, this is going to be directed by Stephanie Sandberg. But once your student gets so involved, you see that it's really going to benefit them to have a co-creator title, a co-author title, or however you want to word that, because that's going to help them in to start their career, to start their own work. I mean, these art forms are incredibly collaborative, by their very nature, [you] cannot create theater and film by yourself. All you have to do is watch the credits at the end of the movie to see like the entire city that made the film.

Ruth Candler
That's a good description.

Stephanie Sandberg
And, you know, and that's how it is. So we don't create in a vacuum, we do not create alone. So the students are - I want to create with students, because also they bring in their own generational perspectives, they bring in their own ideas, you know, and I'm feeling that generational shift more and more as I get older and older. But I still feel like, you know, the new perspectives are always good. And we also have international students who bring in international perspectives. So I want all of that. I think diversity in making art is so important... We absolutely know that there's more creative involvement and better outcomes when there's more diversity involved in the project. So I always want to model that, and we should be modeling what the world should look like at a liberal arts institution. So we should model diversity, we should model good learning, we should model ethics, all of these things.

Ruth Candler
I really like that statement. I'm so impressed by how you have been able to create these compelling works of art, and that they also serve as a catalyst for change. You mentioned all the topics that include racism, faith, the plight of refugees, human sex trafficking and domestic violence. All of these are very challenging topics to discuss. The research required to prepare these pieces must involve many hours of interviews with dozens of people. And I volunteer at the women's shelter that you mentioned earlier, and also at another agency, where I've listened to these stories, and they're difficult to hear. So, you know, I do understand that it's not easy for your subjects or your team to discuss the trauma involved in these experiences. How do you protect your interview subjects from being traumatized again through the reliving of these experiences? And then on the other hand, how do you shield yourself and your students from the secondhand trauma of hearing those stories?

Stephanie Sandberg
That's a great question. Secondhand trauma, or repeated trauma from interviewing, is an incredibly important thing to talk about. So first of all, when I started to get involved with this kind of work, I realized very quickly that I needed to use what we call the institutional review board at whatever institution I was at to make sure that I was being safe and thorough in assessing risk. And so we do that, we go through a risk assessment and make sure that those people that we're interviewing, we're not putting them at greater risk. So let's use the Domestic Violence Project as an example. We went through that risk assessment and then we fully educated the students working on the project about the subject matter so that you have a trauma-informed approach to the research and to the interviews. And that means that you learn about how trauma affects the body and the mind and how people experience trauma, and then how they talk about it and tell it. And so that is number one.

And then I actually went off and got training in trauma-informed interviewing and trauma-informed sensitivity so that I could be fully engaged and aware of what was happening. We also make sure that the students have access to counseling in case there is a problem or an issue that arises. And then I'm like always aware that I need to be talking to somebody else about what the research is and what I'm doing. So I have always relied on having really strong therapists who I can go to and talk to about what I'm hearing. So you definitely need to protect the researchers on the side of the people who are being interviewed. You make sure that they know all the questions ahead of time, and you do a pre-interview with them, where you talk to them very carefully about what they're going to experience in the interview, and maybe even do some test questions with them without camera, without recording. Just can we just chat and talk and walk through it? And I have had people go through a whole interview and then say "No, you can't, I don't want you to use it." Because they have experienced something profound during the interview. And you have to honor that. Absolutely, for sure. And they have the right to pull their interview when they sign our disclosure statement, they have the right to pull their interview up to when we'll show them ... the final cut of the film, and they could still pull it. But once we create it, once they say yes, they sign off on it, then it's locked, and we can't pull it out after that point. So that is always an issue.

But we want to protect people, we work with General Counsel at the university to make sure that we're protecting people and that we're protecting everyone who's involved in the process. I have also found, though, that my experience largely has been that people telling their stories, even very traumatic stories, like for example of a woman who I interviewed who escaped as a refugee from Syria, from Iraq, into Syria, and then into Egypt, and then eventually got to the United States. Her story was so traumatic, she had endured sexual assault several times in the course of her journey, and some starvation and brutality, like you can't imagine. So telling that story again was was incredible to hear from her. But she did say at the end of the interview that the whole process had been empowering for her. And I'd say that that is largely what people experience. Their voices are being heard and recorded and listened to. And they feel like that does empower people.

Ruth Candler
Yeah. And we need to hear their stories, so it's very brave of them to share. I'd like to go back to the piece that you described earlier that you're currently working on, on loneliness. I understand the idea came to you before the pandemic began. The isolation caused by COVID-19 certainly makes your work on loneliness timely. What fascinated you so much about loneliness that you wanted to create a piece of work surrounding it?

Stephanie Sandberg
So this goes back to like, always, there's these inner connectivities between different research projects, and I happen to have been writing a play about the theologian Henry Neuman, who experienced profound loneliness in his own life and actually wrote quite a bit about loneliness. He was a gay priest. Now his sexuality has come out after his death. Even though he admitted it during his life, he just struggled. He was very lonely. He had no way of of expressing himself in terms of intimacy. He was incredibly, I guess you could say, even though he was surrounded by so many people his whole life, he was living a loneliness inside himself. And he had a breakdown because of it. And I was interested in that moment in his life and what happened there. And I found out, you know, that he had gone and experienced, like, gone into like a therapy center that was touch-oriented. Touch therapies go way back in history, but they've emerged as more important than ever before. And of course, we felt that very much during the social distancing of the pandemic. It became a reality that many people hadn't known. Just the starvation of touch. And so he had gone to this place. And I was really interested in what they did.

So I started researching both loneliness and touch therapy and found out I was like, oh, this is so fascinating. But then I set it aside because, I don't know, the project just wasn't taking shape. Sometimes you do that, you just like, okay, put this on the shelf for a while. And if I come back to it, you know, someday something will happen. All of a sudden, I was reading a ton about loneliness in the newspapers, I was like, wow, there's a lot of articles being written and a lot of books being written about this. And then when I started to dig into the scientific research, there's this whole field called social neuroscience, which I didn't know existed, and is the study of how different elements of our psychology, you know, are related to the way the brain works. So I was interested in that, and I just started to research it. And I found out that it was just really amazing the amount of material that was being masked, so loneliness studies is only about 40 years old in terms of, like, an official topic of study. But now there's, like, a lot of literature on it. And there's a lot of really interesting stuff happening out there, like the fact that the U.K. has a minister of loneliness.

Ruth Candler
A minister of loneliness? Wow!

Stephanie Sandberg
A minister of loneliness. Yes, they do. I don't know, to me it sounded like a bad character in an Ionesco play. Anyway, I was just fascinated by the term, they apparently oversee, you know, making sure that that people aren't lonely. And there are three ages where people are the most lonely: one is right after college, in people's 20s. So I was seeing students that were graduating who were feeling lonely. That's a chronic moment, it's a very important moment. In people in their 50s, when they experience the loss, perhaps of a spouse or of a parent, or of a sibling... and whether that's through divorce, or death, or or estrangement, or whatever, it happens [to] people in their 50s, it seems to be another key moment. And then of course, past age 75, people who are elderly and who have so much wisdom and so much to share, and yet they're feeling incredibly lonely. So these three ages, so we wanted to follow people at those three ages and look at that, and also interview all the experts, as well. And so we've interviewed over 50 experts across the world. And then we are following people who are chronically lonely, or who have experienced chronic loneliness in their lives, as well.

Ruth Candler
Well, you work on the project with W&L senior Hieu Nguyen, and that perfectly illustrates two of the concepts we've discussed in this podcast, you know, the benefits of working creatively with students and the way that two seemingly different topics, in this case theater and neuroscience, can be woven together into a fascinating art piece. Hieu is a neuroscience major. How did he contribute to this project?

Stephanie Sandberg
He contributed beautifully in the sense that so he had all this scientific knowledge and also curiosity. I think you also want to spark a student's curiosity. So he knows, as a science student, how to read the literature and summarize it. I would say, "Okay, I need to interview somebody who's working with the elderly, with the geriatric community and who is working specifically on, you know, how to alleviate loneliness in that community. But I want it from a scientific medical perspective, not from sociology perspective. So he would find somebody, then he would research that person after we set up the interview and summarize all of their research, and then send me a list of questions to ask them. You should talk to them about what they found out about the gut biome and loneliness or something like that, you know?

Ruth Candler
That you wouldn't have been thinking about otherwise.

Stephanie Sandberg
Yeah, you wouldn't normally think about it. And he would summarize, he would say, "Oh, you should ask him about it, it was great." So I would read the summaries and I would read the questions. He would say, "Oh, you should definitely read these two articles or three articles. And I would read those and then I was so prepared for the interviews because of him. So I felt really lucky to have him as a student working on this.

Ruth Candler
So Stephanie, we've all felt lonely at times. So personally, what did you learn from working on this project?

Stephanie Sandberg
Well, I've definitely experienced loneliness. It's a universal human feeling, although it doesn't register on the face. You know, there are certain emotions or key emotions that register on the face, and there's not a lonely face.

Ruth Candler
Wow, that's an interesting...

Stephanie Sandberg
That is very interesting, it's an interesting idea. So I definitely have experienced it myself. And I was trying to understand, you know, how does it become chronic? So I know I've experienced it, but for me, it hasn't become a chronic condition. When the neural pathways get set and it becomes chronic or a habit, loneliness can become a habit...

Ruth Candler
It can become a habit?

Stephanie Sandberg
Definitely, because, like, for example, people who experience social isolation and loneliness, once it becomes embedded in them, they become what's called hypersensitive, right, to any kind of social interaction. And they also become hypervigilant, where like, if somebody acts towards them negatively, it seems far greater to their mind, in terms of negativity than it actually is. So perceptions just go haywire with people who experience chronic loneliness. And so then they'll be like, Okay, I'm done, I'm definitely not going to go out. Definitely not going to try. So then it sets in deeper. And so it can become an ingrained habit that keeps people in a state of loneliness.

Ruth Candler
So based on what you've learned, what would you share with us that might help ease someone's feeling of loneliness?

Stephanie Sandberg
The number one thing that we know, and this is from scientific studies, and there are several good studies out there about what's called "pro-social behavior." So this means that it can't just be your own social behavior, it has to be pro-social. In other words, you're interacting with other human beings over something you care about. Okay? So this could be quilting, you could be quilting quilts for babies who need them, maybe in another country, or you could be gathering together to save the whales, or you could be working on a climate change project, or you could be working in your community on political action. But it has to be pro-social, it has to be involved with other human beings.

So they did this study during the pandemic because they knew people were lonely. This is a study that was done at University of California, Berkeley. So they took people and they gave them cards to write, they said, okay, would you write to people and send them a kind word, write people who are feeling lonely? That was one group. And then they had the other group who didn't do that, but who just continued their behavior. The people who were writing these words of encouragement to other people, their loneliness quotient went down significantly. And it was also that they knew they were doing it as a group, those who knew they were doing it as a group effort, their loneliness went even further down. So we are hardwired to be with groups, like you look at the evolution of humanity, we are hardwired to try to be together, to try to stay together. So loneliness is actually an evolutionary reaction. It's our biology saying "No, no, no, no, no, no, no, you need to be with other people." Yeah, you're gonna feel lousy, and the reason you're gonna feel lousy, which is loneliness, is because you're supposed to be out there with other people, you are not supposed to be alone. So that's how we survive, we survive through social behavior. So pro-social behavior, doing stuff together, really, really matters.

Ruth Candler
But it sounds like it's doing things together, in addition to doing something good for others.

Stephanie Sandberg
Yeah. It seems to be that if it's not only pro-social, like you're gathering together, but doing good things where you can see efficacy, you can see the changes that are being made around you, then you feel really great about it. And then you alleviate your loneliness.

Ruth Candler
Thank you. Thank you. for that. Hopefully we can include a link to that study in our episode notes... ...and include some of those great suggestions that you had. So Stephanie, we've discussed some pretty heavy topics today, and I think your perspective on these topics as a storyteller is going to mean a lot to our listeners. In the time that we have left, I'd like to learn a little more about you and what you do when you're not on campus. So I've heard that you are very dedicated to the practice of yoga, ven teaching it as a group exercise class at W&L. What do you enjoy about yoga?

Stephanie Sandberg
Yeah, I'll find it for you. What I really love about yoga is the mind-body connection. It is a mindfulness practice, it actually means "union." Yoga means "union." It is a practice where you feel your mind and your body, and your heart, and your intellect, all kind of coming together. And it's meditation in motion. So I love to meditate as well. But I love the practice of meditation in motion. And one of my teachers actually calls yoga "body prayer."

Ruth Candler
I've never heard that comment before.

Stephanie Sandberg
Yeah, so you're using your whole body to express gratitude, and also sometimes to express need, and sometimes ... you do go through some suffering once you do yoga [laughs]. But that suffering is part of our understanding of the world. We know that we suffer, but there are ways to alleviate that suffering. So I think yoga is one of them. Getting on that mat every day is one way of alleviating suffering.

Ruth Candler
Alright, so I'm going to change change topics for a second and ask you what your favorite movie or play that you have not had a part in creating would be.

Stephanie Sandberg
Well, plays and films are so different, but I'll start with the theater. So there's a theater company called Complicité, and they created a piece called "Mnemonic," which is about memory. And that play showed me the power of theater and how it could be multimedia and how it could use soundscapes and different ideas to understand. So they were trying to understand the meaning of human memory. They tell a story in it about the iceman. Do you remember that, like, iceman guy that was discovered between Switzerland and France up in the Alps?

Ruth Candler
Oh yeah, yeah.

Stephanie Sandberg
So it kind of centers on him and the discovery of him, and the scientists who discovered him, but they're trying to understand, like, his history and memory, and it's a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful play. And so I wish that I always just think back on having seen that, and knowing how powerful theater can be. There are moments that just stay with me from it. And then you know, I love the film "Amelie," the French film. Yeah. And I love it because of its style. Its a beautiful story about love and its comic moments, and its dark moments, and it's just such a lovely piece to watch. And sometimes I just think, like, pure aesthetic enjoyment should be at the heart of some of what we do, you know?

Ruth Candler
I agree, I agree. Alright, so on that note of film and theater, in all the characters that you've been introduced to through theater and film, who would you most like to have lunch with?

Stephanie Sandberg
Are we talking, like, playwrights and authors or are we talking characters in...

Ruth Candler
I was talking characters, but if you want to answer differently, please do.

Stephanie Sandberg
Okay, so I always think about whenever I see a film, I'm like, "Oh, I'd really like to talk to that person." Or, you know, there's certain characters I think that that's true about, and I just saw a film. Well, I mean, I have seen new films all the time. But I just saw the film "Belfast," which Kenneth Branagh made about his growing up in Belfast, Ireland. And I've just felt like I really wanted to talk to Kenneth Branagh. This experience growing up there. Like, I love the film, and it's such a beautiful story about him as a little boy, and I love it. It's gorgeous. But I just wanted to know more. I wanted to sit down and have a conversation with him about his life and how growing up in that turmoil affected him. Yeah.

Ruth Candler
Well, you've also said that you're constantly trying new art forms as a way to develop your own creativity, and that most recent art form is ballroom dancing. What is it about ballroom dancing that you find so interesting and enjoyable?

Stephanie Sandberg
So first of all, I love ballroom dancing because of the connectivity between the two people who are doing it. And of course, you're in a whole group as well. So you're in the connectivity of the two people, but then you're in, like, a room full of people dancing. So I love the connection, and the conversation of the body is amazing. So there's a shared intimacy with your partner. that I don't know that you get from other art forms. You know, I really think it happens in dance. So I always wanted to learn, and I finally have a partner who was willing to learn with me. And so I'm like, "Yeah, I'm gonna do this right now." And I have this opportunity. So no, it's just so much fun. And you reach a whole new communication level with somebody. And it challenges you to think differently. So yeah, other art forms, you have to study them, you have to, I think, I always tell my screenwriting students and my writing students and playwriting students, you need to learn how to draw, you need to learn how to paint, you need to learn how to sculpt, you need to learn how to, you know how to make graffiti, art, I mean, whatever, I want them to experience other art forms so that they can bring those creative processes into their own creative. It just it invigorates your creative process.

Ruth Candler
Well, I love that you're leading by example. Before we wrap up today, I'd like to go back to our students. If you could give them one piece of advice, taking into account your research and understanding of how theater fits into a liberal arts education, what would you say to them?

Stephanie Sandberg
If I could give students any piece of advice? I would say don't let curiosity die. Always be curious. Continue to challenge yourself in terms of what you're curious about. So you know, really try to be a lifelong learner, and try to bring that lifelong learning into what you do in your life. And, you know, I mean, not everybody is going to be able to be a poet. So there's going to be some people who are poets, and there's going to be some people who are civil engineers, and they're, you know, but there can be civil engineer poets, as well. There are people who do both. So I think some people feel like, "Oh, I'm just gonna get stuck in this one career." And I'm no, you do not have to do that. You do not have to settle. You can do a career in engineering and be a great painter. You can do a career in neuroscience and be a medical doctor, and be an incredible storyteller. No, right or wrong answer. So it's like, I think that I had this idea when I was a student that I had to either be a professional artist or I was failing somehow. And that's just not true. It's just not true. You know, you can do both. I know a great counselor/therapist who is a fantastic actor, you know. And so he does both in his life. And both sides feed him, and he finds those sides of his life feeding each other.

I think it's so important to follow your passions and your gifts, and to find a vocation that fits you, you know. I love the definition of vocation, that it's where your gifts meet the world's needs. And so sometimes you've got multiple of those, you know, you've got multiple gifts, so you have to find a way to use them. And sometimes the world's needs are just looking at a pretty picture. So you could be a great photographer and take pictures and share them with people. So you know, there's so many ways, so many avenues. And so you should never think that you can only do one thing.

Ruth Candler
That is a wonderful note to end on. Thank you, Stephanie. We appreciate you joining us today.

Stephanie Sandberg
No problem. Thank you for having me.

Ruth Candler
To all of you who are tuned in, thanks for joining us, as well. If you'd like to learn more about Stephanie's work, please visit the show notes on our website, wlu.edu/lifelong. You'll also find more information about our other W&L Lifelong Learning programs, including programs where you can join us on campus, abroad, and in your very own home.