M I L L A . R I G G I O

The following feature story appeared in the campus publication MOSAIC in September, 1996.

Milla Riggio

The "playing" is the thing

In Milla Riggio's classroom, the "playing" is the thing. Students in her classes on the works of Shakespeare, Brecht, Shaw, O'Neill, and other dramatists learn quickly that their syllabus will carry them far beyond the familiar tasks of reading, classroom discussion, and paper writing.

They will almost certainly encounter Riggio's "playing game," a carefully structured assignment that requires students to choose a scene from the drama under study and to prepare a live performance.

"Most students are terrified by the assignment. But they are almost always dying to do it a second time," Riggio said. Since joining Trinity's English department in 1973, Riggio has developed a reputation as a passionate, creative, and challenging teacher and as an innovator who always seeks new methods of teaching her students. In 1992 she was awarded the College's highest honor for faculty - the Brownell Prize, which recognizes outstanding teaching.

Riggio's teaching philosophy is emblematic of the goal of Trinity's liberal arts program. "You have to give students tools of analysis and give them access to accumulated knowledge. I also think it is a teacher's job to kick holes in the wall in order to let in fresh air," she said. "You have to make students a little uncomfortable, to challenge unexamined preconceptions. Both the teacher and the student have to take some risks."

Exploring possibilities

In addition to performance as a classroom exercise, Riggio offers two other major pedagogical methods: bringing students together with playwrights, directors, actors, and other theater professionals and exploring the possibilities of film and computer technology.

In the early 1980s, she began working with students and professionals to stage larger productions, such as the medieval miracle play Wisdom and Shakespeare's Othello, which was staged at Trinity in 1991-92. "To walk the path from no performance to classroom performance to producing a drama as publicly performed act requires a lot from students. It's a real challenge," she said.

Drama also engages students in challenging encounters with other cultures and helps them to develop their comparative and analytical skills, Riggio said. "Drama often arises out of the context of festivals, and you have to place festive drama into the context of the culture that gives rise to it." In 1997-98 Riggio will offer a course exploring the Trinidadian carnival, which reflects her keen current scholarly interest in Afro-Caribbean culture and drama.

To better appreciate the different facets of performance, she increasingly utilizes film and computer technology to allow students to view, analyze, and even "cut and paste" many filmed performances.

"Students have to learn how to 'read' film texts, to learn to follow the movement of a film as they would a literary text, to master the rhetoric of film." That means mastering the analysis of camera angles, camera movement, mise-en-scene, lighting, editing, and sound. "Students have been looking at film all their lives, but they've never learned how to analyze it."

Quoting images

Over the past several years, Riggio has worked with student computer consultant Benjamin DeVore '97 to adapt an interactive Shakespeare computer project that allows her students to prepare "papers" that use both text and clips of film. Working on specially equipped computers in the English department and the library, students view multiple versions of a play and "cut and paste" individual scenes to create their own multi-media texts. "This allows them to 'quote' images in the same way one quotes written texts," Riggio explained.

The coordinated use of video and computer technology also allows students to compare different productions of the same drama, which often leads them to uncover new insights into variations among cultures and subcultures. Last spring, in a course entitled "Drama Classics Reinterpreted," Riggio and visiting lecturer, playwright, and former director of new play development for Hartford Stage Company Kim Euell assigned students to compare "very culturally specific" stagings of several dramas. One sequence focused on Sophocles' Antigone, a modern Argentine version (Antigone Furiosa) set in the "troubles" of the late 1980s, and An African Antigone by contemporary Nigerian playwright Femi Osofisan.

In another sequence, a modern English version of Shakespeare's King Lear and House of Lear (a staging of Lear in New York's gay and lesbian "house" subculture) were introduced with a showing of the film Paris Is Burning. Playwright Reggie Jackson and actor/director Reggie Montgomery, who has previously directed two plays and is scheduled to direct a third at Hartford Stage, visited the class to discuss Jackson's recasting of Lear in the elaborate transvestite culture of balls and festivals in contemporary New York. Montgomery recently joined Trinity's faculty in the theater and dance department.

Although Riggio is interested in exploring the drama of ethnically diverse cultures, she believes that for modern American students comparative study should be based on a mastery of Western literary and dramatic traditions. "I'm still enough of an old-fashioned scholar to think that the American groundedness in European culture is a fundamental aspect of our experience."

-Andrew Walsh '79

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