Theatre Design & Technology - Winter 2017 - 51

crowds, and everybody wants to stand over your shoulder and everybody wants to tell you how to do your job.
It's just this tight little cluster of darkness, and everything that's bright and happy is way over there. You just
have to learn how to be there and yet not be there. Or
be there and not let all of that affect what's going on
here." Former student Kristen Geisler concurs, noting
that Yeager's training enables him to model calm for his
students: "It was amazing to me watching him in tech
and talking to directors and the way that he was able
to sort of take in all the stress... We did one show...
I've never seen a director so high-strung... And Kenton
just didn't say anything against it. He didn't react to it.
He just absorbed his energy. He absorbed his nervousness, sort of flushed it back out in that very calm way. I
would love to be able to do that and it's something that
I'll have to spend my entire life working on."
It's important to understand that meditative practices are not just about "keeping your cool." Josafath
( Joe) Reynoso, who was a scene design student taking some classes with Yeager at the time he was interviewed, is now embarking on his own career as a
teacher at the University of Richmond. He said it was
more about relating the principles to work and life than

about doing the exercises. "What I find that's really
useful for me in his class is that it creates this environment, which I've told [Yeager] numerous times before,
it's deeply human."
Much like Porter's students, none of Yeager's students or alumni are particularly enamored with seated
meditation. Many recent studies explore why we find
it so hard to sit still and stay present, particularly in
our digital age of constant stimuli and instant information, which many researchers argue is causing negative
conditioning for all of us. In his 2006 book Stumbling
on Happiness, Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert asserts
that what makes humans unique is our ability to be
constantly thinking about the future. Our frontal lobe
developed exactly for that purpose, he says, and these
tendencies are tied to our very normal desire to increase
pleasure and avoid unpleasant surprises. While this
ability works well for our functionality in the world, it
tends to make us unhappy and anxious. Gilbert explains
that as far back as the 1850s, it was known that frontal
lobe damage, though not seeming to affect intelligence,
caused patients to become extremely calm. But in the
1980s, researchers discovered that it also destroyed
those patients' ability to plan or contextualize the fu-

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