Testimonial by Cristina Modreanu, Visiting Scholar NYU Performance Studies Department

It took me a while until I realized that I am in the middle of an experiment which is likely to change forever my view on life and my professional approach. My Fulbright experience is in all ways an enlightening one: since I first entered the Performance Studies floor at Tisch School of the Arts on Broadway I started learning how the learning process can be designed to be not only instructive but also enjoyable. The amazing professors at NYU are determined to use any strategy and new technology in order to help their students enter their professional life as ready as possible. What is called “educational process” is in fact a wonderful, difficult, but enriching journey that everyone is taking in order to become someone else – a better person. Michel Foucault’s “technologies of the self” are not only mentioned often, but also put into practice.

I have never thought that my first real teaching experience would take place in the virtual space! And yet, after working for my classes at NYU with the Blackboard (an on-line tool designed to keep the teachers and the students connected in working groups) and after giving my presentation on Performance in a Globalized World at the end of the Fall semester using the high-tech equipment of NYU studio, like everyone else, nothing seemed more familiar to me than lecturing via Skype.

As suggested by Mr. Alexa Visarion, the head of the Doctoral School of Bucharest University for Theater and Film, a Fulbright alumni himself, I engaged in a series of on-line conversations with the students of the doctoral school from the Bucharest University for Theater and Film. The first lecture took place on 7th of November and the issue discussed was New Narrative Structures in Contemporary American Theater and the second one took place on 15th of December with a focus on 10 innovative productions as seen on New York stage.

Looking forward to my next on-line lecture which is planned for February 2012, I can only thank Fulbright Commission, NYU Performance Studies Department and the amazing professors Richard Schechner, Deborah Kapchan, Karen Shimagawa and Barbara Browning for helping me to be a part of the Fulbright and NYU communities and find a way to share all that I learn with my Romanian counterparts.

New York, 10th of January 2012