Stage Door to Yale's University Theatre.

Well, not quite. After a full year of working behind the scenes and being tucked away from the world in a corner full of theories, case studies, histories, visions, ideas and concepts, however, I am definitely feeling somewhat … exposed.

As a second-year management student at YSD, I was presented with the opportunity to spend a term away from the School and at a professional setting (determined by the faculty). The motivation behind this–the Arts Management Fellowship–is that, in the performing arts, theoretical knowledge alone cannot, and does not, suffice; it must be applied and practised upon before it can be of use.

Michael Kaiser expressed a similar thought in his most recent article, published Tuesday in The Huffington Post:

Arts management is a young field. While wonderful impresarios have operated for centuries, serious codification of the rules of arts management began less than fifty years ago. And while we have a number of academic programs offered by universities across the nation, there are simply not enough of them, and several are too academic in their approach. Arts management, after all, is a practical field, like medicine, and must be taught through real-time, real world experiences.

And, thus do I find myself back on the Pacific Coast, this time in Seattle, Washington.

View of the Seattle Center and the Space Needle from the apartment.

I’ve just completed the first week of my Fellowship at Seattle Repertory Theatre, where I will be working closely under the guidance and mentorship of the managing director (a theatre’s counterpart to a dance company’s executive director). I’m very much looking forward to learning how Seattle Rep manoeuvres around the challenges presented by the economic downturn as well as to studying how the Theatre uses the attributes unique to itself to further its defining vision. It’s only been four days, but I am already impressed by the consistent deference made to the art. (In many, though not all, of my past situations, I sadly witnessed the opposite–the art was compromised before all else.)

Of course, the other wonderful thing about being in Seattle for Fellowship is that I am wonderfully close to PNB, which is located on the same block as the Theatre. I’m looking forward to progressing my recuperation from inside the studio as well as enjoying firsthand what promises to be a great season for PNB.

It was raining when I arrived in Seattle last weekend. (Surprise!) As I drove in from the airport, this rather large building housing a business called 1-800-WATER-DAMAGE did not go unnoticed.