Experiential Learning

The Lanford Wilson New American Play Festival

At Dobbins Conservatory, students help shape the next generation of American theatre.

The Lanford Wilson New American Play Festival brings playwrights, professional theatre artists, and students together for a week of new plays, creative collaboration, and hands-on learning at SEMO’s River Campus. The festival champions work with substantial roles for young actors, developing plays for both college and professional stages.

Named in honor of Missouri-born playwright Lanford Wilson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Talley’s Folly and a pioneering voice in the Off-Off-Broadway movement, the festival celebrates his legacy by supporting new American voices.

Each year, a nationwide submission process leads to the selection of five full-length plays and seven short plays. The festival emphasizes complex characters primarily between the ages of 15 and 30, with particular encouragement for work offering substantial roles for young women.

Dobbins students work directly with visiting playwrights and professional directors to bring these scripts to life through public staged readings. Rehearsals and audience conversations give writers opportunities to explore their work while students gain firsthand experience collaborating on plays still in development. Workshops and masterclasses connect students and early-career artists with working professionals in performance, writing, directing, design, and new play development.

The festival’s reach extends beyond the week itself. One full-length play receives the festival’s top prize and a fully-produced mainstage production in the following Dobbins Conservatory mainstage season. The winning script is also considered for publication by Concord Theatricals, whose representatives participate in the festival’s reading and selection process as well as selection of the Festival's top prize.

For students, the festival offers the chance to build professional relationships, originate roles, and contribute to a play’s journey from the page to the stage.

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Fault Line Film Festival

Each year, Dobbins Conservatory teams up with the Department of Mass Media, Art and Design to host the Fault Line Film Festival, a national film competition for student filmmakers. The festival awards cash prizes and trophies in several categories, including a $1,000 grand prize for Best of Festival. The selected films are shown on campus, and the winning filmmakers are recognized in an awards ceremony after the screenings.

Guests walk the red carpet into the Rose Theatre, where a packed audience watches the films and votes for their favorite to win the Audience Choice Award.

Performance majors from Dobbins Conservatory act in most SEMO student films, and many also work behind the scenes—writing, directing, filming, and editing. The festival has become a favorite event for students and faculty and continues to grow each year.

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Dueling Arts International

A convincing stage fight takes precision, trust, and a clear sense of the story. Through Dobbins Conservatory’s academic partnership with Dueling Arts International (DAI), students learn to create compelling physical conflict while prioritizing the safety of their fellow performers.

Training combines acting and movement, challenging students to make every action serve the character and the scene. As they progress, students develop coordination, control, and the communication skills essential to rehearsing and performing choreographed combat.

Students study six core combat disciplines:

• Unarmed combat

• Medieval broadsword

• Rapier and dagger

• Transitional single rapier

• Smallsword

• Quarterstaff

Additional training may explore knife work, sword and shield, theatrical martial arts, and combat for the camera.

Through Stage Combat I, II, and III, students build their skills progressively and can pursue DAI certification through skills testing. Intensive workshops, including DAI’s summer workshop hosted at SEMO, offer opportunities to deepen their training and work with visiting combat instructors.

From an intimate struggle on camera to a sword fight onstage, students learn to approach physical storytelling with confidence, care, and dramatic purpose.

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Study Abroad

Studying abroad gives students the chance to encounter theatre, dance, and daily life from a different perspective. Through short-term faculty-led trips, semester exchanges, and summer programs, SEMO students can experience how other communities train, create, and tell stories.

For developing artists, those encounters can open up new ways of working: discovering unfamiliar performance traditions, collaborating across cultural differences, and reconsidering assumptions about their own craft.

Dobbins Conservatory is the official academic exchange partner of EDDA HØYSKOLE, a performing arts school in Oslo, Norway with an emphasis on method acting.

NSKI was founded in 2009 and is a small, highly rigorous school located in the capital city of Norway.

The performing arts college offers bachelor’s programs in acting, musical theatre, screenwriting, and directing, with an emphasis on Method Acting and collaboration across disciplines.

The exchange works in both directions: Dobbins also welcomes students from Oslo each semester to train on the River Campus. Whether studying overseas or working alongside visiting classmates, students encounter different approaches to performance, exchange ideas, and build artistic relationships across oceans.